American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Nietzsche read his way through Emerson to his own ideas about the intellectual free spirit who must break the chain of history, of tradition, and of convention. Over time, he came to identify himself as a sovereign self who refused to exalt inherited ideals.

Nietzsche had entered the gymnasium at age fourteen with an ardent Lutheran faith as his trusty companion. He came from a line of Lutheran clergy—both his paternal and maternal grandfathers had been ministers, as was his beloved father, Ludwig.

Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism (the denial of universal truth), together with his sustained critiques of Christian morality, Enlightenment rationality, and democracy, has compelled many Americans to question their religious ideals, moral certainties, and democratic principles.

he was enlisted as a moralist and cultural critic. Overwhelmingly, Americans took an interest in Nietzsche’s criticism of democratic equality, in his cultural insights about democratic man. When Nietzsche appeared in American political thought, he did so as a thinker about the human culture American democracy fosters.

American Nietzsche

This book, then, is neither a hagiography of, nor a screed about, Nietzsche. It is not even a book about Nietzsche. It is a story about his crucial role in the ever-dynamic remaking of modern American thought.

Urban, like so many others after him, came to mark his own intellectual development according to that first contact with Nietzsche. For him it was an event, which marked nothing less than the beginning of his “self-conscious purposive thinking.”

In his eleven-part series, “Sermons from the New Bible: Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Reitzel characterized Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as a modern work of sacred scripture.

he warned that it was also “an apocalypse from which today’s sick draw resources without getting cured.” Nevertheless, he encouraged his readers to bear Nietzsche’s hard truths

His Nietzsche knew no national home precisely because he recognized the transitory nature of all states of belonging. He quoted Nietzsche from Human, All Too Human, noting, “Whoso has attained even only in a degree to the freedom of reason cannot feel himself other than as a wanderer on the earth—even if not as a traveller toward a final destination: for there is none.”

citizen of the world

The problem with modern democracy is that it mistakes “plutocracy” for leadership and “ballotocracy” for public order.

All turned to Nietzsche as evidence that modern individuality can only be achieved, not inherited, and that it is the product of a free mind, not a free market.

New York Times Saturday Review, as he wondered why Americans should pay their respects to the “dead lunatic” from Germany: “Nobody denies that he said a good many striking things…. But the man was a madman, and what possible value attaches to the blasphemies of a mad atheist?”

The character of his German cannot be reproduced in English; it is something foreign to English thought.”77 Of concern to reviewers was whether there was an inherent incommensurability between the German language and the English language, between the German intellect and the American mind.

the German intellect and the American mind

questioned whether Nietzsche’s philosophy was simply another “ism” of modern thought, or a devastating critique of its entire philosophical grounds.

While they might reject “theoretical Nietzscheism,” they had long ago embraced it in practice. Commercialism, greed, laissez-faire, the quest for empire: these were the cornerstones of American life. Americans, he speculated, would very well find “theoretical Nietzscheism” abhorrent, precisely because it so accurately laid bare their ethics.

Nietzsche enjoyed a vogue in Europe because Europe takes seriously, if too seriously, the work of its thinkers. But the question of whether America was or should be capable of the same was a matter of dispute.

No author did more to establish the persona of Friedrich Nietzsche in America than H. L. Mencken.

Nietzsche’s inventive use of language emboldened Mencken to manufacture some terms of his own, most famously “booboisie” and “boobus Americanus.”

Mencken was “brought up in the fear of the Lord” as “ideal train-ing for sham-smashers and freethinkers.”

Nietzsche’s need to resist the apron strings of matrimony as essential to his intellectual freedom: “A wife’s constant presence, day in and day out, would have irritated him beyond measure or reduced him to a state of compliance and sloth…. The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.”

1898 New York Times article, “Interesting Revolutionary Theories from a Writer Now in a Madhouse,” helped establish the centrality of his mental state for assessing his philosophy.104 Nietzsche’s mental collapse transfigured easily into object lessons on alternately the sufferings of genius in American democratic culture or the healthy American suspicion of Continental intellectualism.

Carus mixed pity and mockery as he repeatedly stressed the contrast between Nietzsche’s strident and muscular language and his wracked health and modest, even self-effacing, temperament:

the first dissertation on Nietzsche in America was written by a woman who addressed these very issues demonstrates how gendered ideas about modern moral flaccidity, and anxieties about the feminization of intellect and virtue, worried thinkers both male and female.

but Nietzsche, Willcox argued, thought that “life was to be made bearable, not by making it easier or by diminishing the sum of suffering, but by enlarging our conceptions of life, by conceiving it as more intense, more grandiose, more imposingly beautiful.”

it was altogether “unnecessary to point out how alien [was] Nietzsche’s whole attitude of mind to the American temper.” America may worship individualism, but a deep reverence for human individuality was something altogether different.

Conventional wisdom casts him as an unapologetic atheist unafraid to do the dirty work of post-Enlightenment thought.

Christianity, “mankind’s greatest misfortune,” with its “conception of God” “pitiable, absurd, harmful, not merely an error but a crime against life.”

But he also insisted that their time, his time, would come. “If there is today still no lack of those” who had yet to realize that Christianity had overstayed its welcome in “the modern age,” Nietzsche averred, “well, they will know it tomorrow.”1 When they did, he insisted, they would recognize his philosophy as a monumental event in human history, and his name the designation of a new era:

they surveyed the modern social types for whom religion had lost its moral force. They singled out the university professoriate, natural scientists, bohemian artists, liberated women, and captains of industry

“No one can think, and escape Nietzsche.”

there was little agreement as to just what, both in theory and in practice, being modern actually meant. Was it defined by the rejection of Christian values, or simply the absence of them? Was modern man pessimistic and nihilistic? Or was he naively optimistic about an unbounded moral universe and thus too immature to accept the incongruities of human existence?

being modern

The wrestling over terminology reveals that while many commentators understood modern as a moral rather than a temporal designation, there was little consensus about what constituted its oppositional features.

they also agreed that the battle for the modern American soul was a zero-sum game: moderns would cleave their spirits and moral imagination either to Nietzsche or to Christ.

despite Nietzsche’s professed atheism, his life and thought offered much for Catholics to admire. His was a “strenuous,” “suffering,” “unselfish” “life militant” marked by “purity, integrity, [and] utter unworldliness.”31 Despite being the sweetheart of libertine artists and writers, Nietzsche criticized the decadence and pessimism of modern aesthetics.

Nietzsche’s insight, that “it is the greatest mistake to confound liberty with the possession of certain external privileges,” and that doing so often makes the weak beholden to the very oppressors whom they asked to grant them.

these socially progressive and politically engaged liberal Protestants, eager to see their faith realized in the social realm.41 Propelled by a sense of urgency about the increasingly menacing social problems posed by industrial capitalism, they sought to reformulate liberal theology

The prospect that “the Christian character has become an impracticable dream,” argued Unitarian minister and Harvard professor of Christian ethics Francis Peabody, “shakes the very pillars of Christian loyalty, and leaves of Christian ethics nothing more than a picturesque ruin, overthrown by the earthquakes of modern change.”

we foresee that everything is humbling itself, to be reduced more and more to something more inoffensive, slighter, more prudent, more mediocre, till the superlative insignificance of the Christian virtues is reached.…

Nietzsche gave moderns good reason to question the reasonableness and practicability of Christianity. To deny religious doubt or to cast it as sinful, Mathews stressed, only allowed a greater rift between the church and the world.

While Catholics argued that engagements with secular philosophies like Nietzsche’s compromised the Christian faith, liberal Protestants typically argued that such intellectual engagement was essential if the church wished to remain relevant to modern affairs.

historians of Gilded Age and Progressive Era American Protestantism have noted, liberal Protestant men at the turn of the last century began to recoil from the feminine qualities that they perceived were plaguing the faith and longed to (re-)create “muscular” forms of Christian piety.

He agreed with Nietzsche that modern Christian practice had degenerated into a despiritualized humanitarianism and a commitment to good manners.

Because he believed that there existed no timeless, universal methods for validating meaning, he ruled out all metaphysical and transcendental foundations for religious beliefs. However, he didn’t rule out believing itself. Nietzsche had stressed that valuations are still possible. But rather than grounding the study of religion in universal claims, the value of its beliefs was demonstrated by their human uses, not their purported divine origins. Instead of asking if a belief is true, Nietzsche asked what benefits come to those who held such beliefs.

“Doubtless it will be an interesting surprise to many American and English pragmatists to learn that Nietzsche has anticipated all their principle [sic] doctrines.”

Once moderns could find in Nietzsche reasons to doubt the absoluteness of Christianity as well as an antidote to disenchantment accompanying that doubt, it would be difficult to return to Jesus as rock and refuge: “we cannot lead [our] age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him.”82

Modern science successfully challenged the toppled absolutes of religion, showing God to be a “human fantasy,” but not the ultimate absolute in man:a yearning for transcendence.93

Foster argued, then, that in coming to Nietzsche, one comes closer to himself: Nietzsche as one’s inner messiah.

many of the Übermensch’s most vocal enthusiasts were socialists. In the quest for social harmony, their Übermensch embodied the strong self pitted not against others but rather against the lingering grip of stifling bourgeois ethics and aesthetics in modern society.

the enemies of the Übermensch were the retrograde aspects of modern life: laissez-faire economics, the American plutocracy, repressive sexuality and gender roles, and the “slave morality” of bourgeois culture.

In his estimation, Nietzsche had envisioned the Übermensch as a being whose aim was not to hoist self over society but to achieve self-overcoming (Überwindung).He contended that Nietzsche’s “will to power” had little to do with “mere brute force,” but rather was best understood in a transcendentalist sense of self-mastery.

Nietzsche and Buddha